On Sept. 29, the Policy and International Cooperation Institute of the China Internet Network Information Center released the Report on the Development of Generative Artificial Intelligence Applications (2026) at the 2026 (7th) China Internet Basic Resources Conference.
The report said China’s generative AI user base exceeded 700 million in the first half of 2026, with penetration above 50.0%. Intelligent Q&A was the leading use case, with 76.0% of users employing the technology to answer questions. The shares of users using it for image or video processing, text drafting and work summaries, meeting minutes, and PPT creation stood at 47.8%, 37.6%, and 32.5%, respectively.
The report also said usage frequency for AI general assistants and AI productivity office tools each rose by more than 100% year over year. Over the past six months, 38.7% of internet users had purchased smart hardware online. Purchase ratios for smart wearables, smartphones, and tablet computers among 3C products were 20.2% and 18.2%, respectively.
On computing capacity, China’s intelligent computing power reached 2,185 EFLOPS as of June 2026, up 177% year over year. The country’s first fully domestic 100,000-card artificial intelligence super cluster had officially been put into operation. In models and data, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, among others, had successively released multiple open-source large models with trillion-level parameters, while more than 120,000 high-quality datasets had been built.
In industrial deployment, the penetration rate of artificial intelligence technology applications among industrial enterprises above designated size had exceeded 30%. In the first half of 2026, more than 400 humanoid robot complete-machine products were launched, and full-year output is expected to exceed 100,000 units.
The report also disclosed financing data. During the same period, there were 1,255 AI-related investment and financing deals totaling about 250.14 billion yuan, reaching 78.0% and 182.0% of the full-year 2025 figures, respectively.